All of my reflective posts and updates on all of my projects

October 26, 2017

Sound Production

For this fashion film I have developed my own sound. As mentioned in the statement of intent I had really focused on the possibility of using the song: A change is Gonna come by Sam Cooke. Having produced the fashion film I had to consider the fitting of the music with the visual aspects. In order to try and create a certain atmosphere that gave a disturbed feeling, I had planned to use a recorded cover version of the song and then to edit it.

To create the song I had recorded my friend perform A change is Gonna come on guitar and singing. I used this recording as a base for the sound track. Initially I had played around with it using Audacity where I had experimented with different pitches, tones and speeds. In the process of this I had done a version which had lowered her voice making it sound like a male’s voice, it was quite mysterious and eerie but I did not feel like that edit worked very well with the visuals.

I continued to experiment on LMMS which is a sound production software, however I was entirely new to the system and wasn’t exactly successful when it came to developing a track. I then turned to Garage band, where I was able to apply a variety of sound effects to the existing recording. This allowed me to experiment with echoes, and applying amp sounds and changing the song speed. After some experimentation, I then imported the track into Adobe after effects film file and used the Audio settings available there.

I found that regardless of how much I distorted and played with the song it just did not fit the exact disturbed atmosphere I had set out to gain. I looked back to some of the research I had carried out and came to an idea to flip the song backwards. This was inspired by the idea of the upside down flag that Sun Mu had done in one of this paintings as a representation of a corrupt country. I used adobe after effects to carry out this task, I also applied the echo settings where I was able to adjust the echo and disturbance of the song. I really liked the outcome of this sound track as it had become unrecognisable and rather disturbing through echo and screeching.

Having developed this distressing and effective sound track, I had set out to experiment further by adding in additional background beats. This was also done using Garage band, by using a variety of instruments and beat loops I developed a ‘house’ style beat to give it more sense of music and beat opposed to just unrecognisable noise. When I had applied the echo and flip effects on the sound track, I found that some of the very high pitched areas had been very hard to listen to as it had become very screeching so I used the volume map on Garage band to level and reduce the noise in selected areas.

Overall I am happy with the outcome of the sound track in regards to its effects and what I had set out to achieve. I feel, although it is an abstract sound it fits quite well with the film and its obscurity. If I had more time to invest into sound production, I would have put in more time into the process of developing my own beat and producing a high quality remix of the recorded track but for the given project I was unable to invest any more time into the production of the sound.